Mixing it up is writer/director François Ozon’s way. Mon Crime (aka The Crime Is Mine) sees him back on the comedic territory of 8 Femmes, Potiche and In the House, leaving his more serious, more recent movies, like Peter von Kant (a remake of a fraught Fassbinder film), Summer of 85 (a veiled autobiography) and Everything Went Fine (a drama about assisted dying) looking a little like aberrations.
Farce, old-school, 1930s-style, screwball is the idea. A style borrowed from Lubitsch and Capra, and a story that looks like it’s borrowed from the 1926 play Chicago but, so we’re told, is actually based on the 1934 play Mon Crime, which, it’s possible, might have lent on the same real-life source material as Chicago.
In a honeyed cosy version of 1930s Paris – all Hitchcock glides and Blake Edwards luxe – Ozon tells the story of a young woman and her friend, not Roxie and Velma but Madeleine (Nadia Tereszkiewicz) and Pauline (Rebecca Marder), who ride a court case hung on the death of a predatory theatre impresario all the way from poverty to fame and fortune.
Did wannabe actress Madeleine really kill randy codger Montferrand (Jean-Christophe Bouvet)? Probably not, but she understands enough about showbiz that a starring role is a starring role and that if limelight comes your way then you leap into it. And her room-mate and bestie Pauline, a budding lawyer, is just the woman to use that exposure to propel the pair of them from poverty to notoriety and wealth.
Until a rival claimant on the crime turns up, faded and broke silent movie star Odette Chaumette (Isabelle Huppert), who not only insists that the crime is hers but has proof! What to do, alors, especially since thus far all concerned have done very well out of the murder?
The energy of this movie goes like this – way up in its opening stretches, then dipping dangerously low in its central courtroom scenes, when Ozon makes heavy-handed points about predatory males and the patriarchy feeling the need to keep women in their place. That out of his system, vigour returns as his film enters its final stretch.
It’s noticeable how much better the oldies are at farce than the two leads. Fabrice Luchini’s early scenes with Olivier Broche, as a dim, self-aggrandising investigating judge and his eye-rolling clerk, are the best in the film, but then Luchini and farce are a combo it’s hard to beat. Later, Huppert also shows how to do it with a demonstration of the delivery of rapid-fire dialogue and a madly exaggerated performance. Even later still, André Dusollier makes it three goals to the veterans as a tycoon whose son wants to marry the notorious Madeleine.
Against the old guard both Tereszkiewicz and Marder – charming, plausible and faultless in their own way – cannot compete, possibly (wheels out ad hoc theory) because younger actors are more about the authentic and older ones understand it’s all just showbiz?
I also enjoyed Dany Boon as an ageing roué with an eye on Madeleine, and Félix Lefebvre as a boy reporter lolling his tongue at Pauline. Both could have been lifted from Roxie Hart, the 1942 non-musical version of Chicago starring Ginger Rogers as a goodtime girl riding a media storm to fame.
I strongly suspect that Ozon and the rest of the cast watched it for inspiration. If you’ve never seen it, it does in 74 minutes what this can’t quite do in 102.
It’s all about air. A fallen soufflé is still tasty, though, and there is a lot to like here, particularly its gorgeous looks and those ripe, hammy performances. Tuck in.
Mon Crime aka The Crime Is Mine – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
I am an Amazon affiliate
© Steve Morrissey 2024
